Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Per Capita Income’

Feb 13

2 Comments

TIGC’s first bowl of 2023 alphabet soup: PCI, JTC, DOR & GOP

Lately I’ve been working on about a half-dozen pieces that have to do in one way or another with the “cold case” I began focusing on about a year ago. Today I’ll hit the highlights (or lowlights) of some of those pieces and tease the follow-ups to come.

First, the 2021 PCI numbers are out and Georgia is still at the bottom of the heap. It was a little over a year ago that I took a deep dive into 2020 per capita income data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and discovered that Georgia had more counties and more people in the bottom national quartile for PCI than any other state. The 2021 data is no better. One-hundred-and-five of the 778 counties in the bottom national quartile are Georgia counties, and those counties are home to 3.2 million people — right at 30 percent of the state’s population. Only Texas, with nearly triple Georgia’s population, has more residents — 3.4 million — in that bottom quartile. North Carolina, with roughly the same population as Georgia and comparable economic and education metrics, has less than a third as many of its citizens in that bottom quartile. Poor ol’ hapless Wheeler County, Ga., still ranks 3,113th out of 3,113 U.S. counties for the second year in a row.

Second, it’s increasingly difficult to ignore the juxtaposition between the state’s PCI performance and its shift to Republican governance. As I noted in one piece on this issue, Georgia made remarkable progress in raising the state’s per capita income in the final years of the 20th century and then surrendered all that progress in the opening years of the 21st century. That rise-and-fall pattern coincided perfectly with the final years of Democratic leadership at the Gold Dome and the opening years of Republican leadership. I said in my early pieces on this subject that I was reluctant to blame Republicans for the collapse in PCI performance, but the question seems a fair one. Sonny Perdue, who defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Barnes in 2002 and became Georgia’s first Republican governor in more than a century, oversaw the biggest decline in PCI performance in at least the last half-century. Under his leadership, Georgia’s per capita income fell from 94.6 percent of the national average to 85.6 percent and we dropped in rank from 26th place to 41st. To be fair, Perdue presided over one of the most challenging economies in the state’s history; he took office in the wake of 9/11 and governed through the Great Recession. But he was hardly alone; 49 other governors faced the same challenges. The question is, why did Georgia fare so much worse during this period than nearly all other states? In the 20 years from the beginning of Democrat Joe Frank Harris’s first term in 1983 and the end of Barnes’s four-year tenure, only one state — Vermont — gained more ground; in the 20 years from the beginning of Perdue’s tenure through the first three years of Governor Brian Kemp’s first term, only one state — Delaware — lost more ground.

Third, one possible answer to that question that deserves more attention is whether Georgia is paying an economic development price for cuts to education. Governor Perdue and his successor Nathan Deal chopped billions of dollars out of the state’s education budget. In what may have been a prescient Georgia Trend column headlined “Perdue’s sad legacy,” the late Tom Crawford wrote this in March 2009: “Georgia is competing against other states to lure sophisticated, high-tech businesses at the same time that we’re spending $2 billion less to train and educate the prospective work force. This doesn’t make any sense at all.” At the same time Crawford wrote that column, rural Georgia enrollment in University System of Georgia institutions was beginning a significant downhill slide. In 2013, the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University produced a report titled “Population, Employment, and Income Trends for Georgia and Atlanta.” Authored by Professor David Sjoquist, that report noted several softening economic trends and listed educational performance as one of the possible reasons why. “It is possible that the relative low performance of the K-12 education system is slowing growth,” Sjoquist’s report said. “The skill level required for most jobs has increased, which means an educated labor force has become increasingly important for attracting jobs. On lots of dimensions, Georgia’s K-12 education system performs well below the national average.” That report went on to note that Georgia ranked “19th in terms of the percentage of the population with at least a college degree,” but neglected to mention that those college graduates were concentrated overwhelmingly in the Atlanta area.

Fourth (and this is being really, really, really charitable), Georgia’s Job Tax Credit ain’t working as originally planned. This program was created in the early 1990s and basically codified raising per capita income, reducing poverty, and creating jobs as important economic development objectives. Initially, the JTC program focused solely on the state’s 40 poorest counties — as determined by a formula that factored in county-level PCI, poverty rates, and unemployment rates. Over time, the program has been expanded in several ways. It now includes all 159 counties, no matter how prosperous, and the counties have been placed in one of four tiers, depending on how they score on the PCI/Poverty/Unemployment formula. Tax credit amounts have been increased and the number of new jobs a business has to create to qualify for the credits has been reduced. When the program was launched in 1991, a company had to create a minimum of 10 jobs in one of the state’s Bottom-40 counties to qualify for a $1,000 per job credit; now, the minimum requirement for those Bottom-40 is down to two jobs and each one entitles the job creator to a $3,500 tax credit. But even that isn’t working — at least not for Georgia’s poorest counties. According to a report by the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR), $56.7 million in tax credits were claimed in 2021 for the creation of 20,417 jobs. My analysis of that report found that only 1,734 of those jobs were created in that year’s Bottom 40 counties, and 20 of those counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job. In contrast, Fulton County alone picked up 5,974 new JTC-supported jobs.

Fifth and last, stir all this data together in a big pot and it pretty much boils over with irony. Perhaps the biggest of these is political. According to the above-mentioned DOR report, 79 of Georgia’s 159 counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job in 2021; in the 2022 governor’s race, 71 of those counties went for incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp. This includes three of the four counties — Brantley, Glascock and Pierce — that gave 90 percent of their vote to Kemp; the fourth of Kemp’s 90-percent counties — Banks — snagged 22 such jobs. Fully 60 percent of the 2021 jobs created under the JTC program went to Democratic counties.

Watch this space. There’s more to come on all these topics.

Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2023

Nov 30

3 Comments

An update on TIGC’s cold case: 36 Georgia counties dead at the scene

A year ago, I stumbled onto a TIGC story that has occupied much of my attention since then. It started when I took what I thought would be a quick look at the latest county-level per capita income (PCI) data from the federal government. As part of that “quick look,” I compared Georgia’s county-level PCI performance to nearly all the other counties in the country and unexpectedly found that we have more counties and more people stuck in the bottom national PCI quartile than any other state.

That discovery pulled me into a year-long examination of barrels full of data, most of it economic, but a lot having to do with education, health, and even politics. I’ve come to think of it as an economics and political cold case, one with myriad clues scattered across geography and time.

Were TIGC a TV crime drama about cold cases, this would be the scene where the investigators stand staring (and still confused) at a huge murder board covered with a mishmash of massive spreadsheets, newspaper clips, and handwritten notes, among other materials. Thick lines would be drawn with Magic Markers to show connections amongst the various dots.

The show’s not over yet, but I can begin to report some of my findings and frame some new questions. For starters, I can offer a body count and damage assessment that I’ve been hesitant to put forward before now.

Tragically, Georgia now has 36 counties that I would declare dead at the scene and dozens more, mostly south of the gnat line, that have been badly wounded and may not make it to a hospital (if there’s still one nearby, that is).

For this post, I’ve compared the performance of Georgia’s 159 counties against roughly 3,000 other counties nationally in four economic categories — per capita income, poverty, gross domestic product per capita, and median household income. I’ve ranked all the counties in each category and then divided each set of rankings into quartiles.

My overarching finding is that Georgia has a highly disproportionate number of counties and shares of population in the bottom national quartile in each of those categories. Here’s a topline summary of what I’ve found so far:

2020 Per Capita Income: One hundred and seven Georgia counties are home to 3.454 million people who fell into the bottom national quartile of 778 counties in this category. That’s more counties and more people than any other state. By comparison, only 39 of Texas’s 254 counties and 3.449 million of its 29.21 million residents landed in the bottom quartile for PCI. Closer to home, Florida has double Georgia’s population but far fewer of its residents — 1.94 million — in this bottom quartile. Similarly, only 29 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and 1.3 million of its 10.45 million residents (only slightly smaller than Georgia’s population) landed in the bottom quartile.

As the map at right shows, most of Georgia’s land mass falls into that bottom quartile. Nationwide, 25.088 million people live in bottom quartile counties. Nearly 14 percent of those are in Georgia.

2020 Poverty: Eighty-nine Georgia counties fell into the bottom national quartile for poverty, based on the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) produced by U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Here, too, Georgia had the largest number of counties in this bottom quartile, and one of the largest populations. Georgia has a total of about 2.66 million people living in these high-poverty counties.

That compares to 1.12 million people living in the 25 Florida counties that landed in this bottom national quartile and 1.62 North Carolinians in that state’s 32 bottom quartile counties.

2020 Median Household Income: The picture here is similar to the PCI and poverty maps. In this case, 76 Georgia counties fell into the bottom national quartile, and there is obviously substantial overlap with the first two maps. Here as well, Georgia has more counties in this bottom national quartile than any other state.

2020 Gross Domestic Product Per Capita: This relatively new dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) offers a county-level look at economic output, and here the picture is a little different. As the map at the left shows, the 81 Georgia counties in the bottom national quartile for this category tend to be more scattered across the state and are less concentrated in South Georgia. This category does, however, have a couple of things in common with the other categories: Georgia once again has more counties in this bottom national quartile than any other state, and the 2.3 million people who live in those counties are among the largest populations stuck in this bottom tier. Texas (with, again, nearly three times the population of Georgia) has 2.9 million people living in the 44 counties that fall into this bottom tier, and retiree-heavy Florida has 3.71 million people living in its 31 low-GDP-per-capita counties.

Finally, Georgia has 36 counties that made the bottom national quartile in all four of these economic categories — and these are the ones I pronounce dead at the scene.

Readers familiar with the geography of poverty and economic deprivation in Georgia will not be surprised at this last map, and, indeed, much of it calls to mind the “crescent of poverty” the late George Berry described for me in an interview a year or so before his death.

Berry had arguably the most storied public administration career in Georgia history. In the 1980s, he served under Governor Joe Frank Harris as commissioner of the Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism (now Economic Development) and was apparently the first individual in that role to emphasize raising per capita income as a key state economic development objective.

(Under Berry’s leadership, the state made remarkable progress in improving PCI through his term and for a decade afterward, only to backslide after the turn of the century.)

In our interview, however, Berry lamented that he “never came up with an answer for what I called ‘crescent of poverty’.”

Neither, obviously, has anybody else. I’ll flesh out their travails in future posts, but it’s difficult at this point to fathom how any of these counties might be resuscitated.

Watch this space for a detailed post-mortem on these 36 counties.

Jul 7

2 Comments

Stacey Abrams pursues a risky campaign strategy

It’s increasingly clear that Stacey Abrams is pursuing a high-risk – dare I say foolhardy? – strategy in her quest for the office of Georgia governor. 

She’s actually asking voters to think.

What I haven’t been able to decide is whether this was her plan all along?  Or if she backed herself into a corner with her “inelegant” (as she later put it) statement that Georgia is “the worst state” in which to live?

Abrams, the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nominee, was complaining at an event in May about incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s incessant invocation of an economic development trade publication’s ranking of Georgia as “the top state for doing business” when she flipped that on its head and offered up the “worst state in the country to live” comment.

The statement was widely panned by Kemp and some in the media as a gaffe.  In a Facebook thread, one politically savvy friend bluntly criticized it as “a dumb, unforced error.”  Another, the estimable Bill Cotterell, long ago UPI’s man at the Georgia State Capitol and now a semi-retired political columnist for The Tallahassee Democrat, offered a more complete explanation.  “My kid might be ugly,” he said, “but you’re not going to win my vote by proving it to me.“

Probably not, but Abrams seems determined to give it her best shot – and for what it’s worth, she’s no stranger to novel political strategies.  When she first took on Kemp four years ago, she came closer to winning than any Democrat in the current millennium by running as an unapologetic progressive.  Four years earlier, Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn, progeny of the state’s two leading Democratic families, got clobbered by running GOP lite campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate.

The Kemp camp, meanwhile, has been positively and predictably gleeful in its reactions – but in the process, it may have overreached.  Kemp and his minions delighted in whacking Abrams about the head and shoulders with press statements and tweets. “Stacey Abrams may think differently,” Kemp harrumphed on Twitter, “but I believe Georgia is the best state to live, work, and raise a family.” To have done less would have been political malpractice, a felony in Georgia.

But then they took it a step further and focused their first ad of the campaign on the issue.  The 30-second spot features Abrams making her “inelegant” statement followed by a handful of headlines favorable to Kemp, after which a narrator declares that Kemp has “kept Georgia the best place to live.”

Really?   

Here, we should pause to recognize the difference in campaign strategies.  If Abrams is asking voters to think, Kemp is asking them not to; instead, he wants them to feel. 

For what it’s worth, his is the more traditional and time-tested approach.  Voters arguably vote their hearts far more than their heads, and appealing to their sense of pride (“best place to live”) no doubt works better in that regard than insulting them (“worst place to live”).

But Kemp’s “best place to live” claim is such an overreach that it merits a TIGC fact-check, and we give it a half-dozen Pinocchios and a pair of flaming tighty-whities.  First, the ad’s messaging logic (for lack of a better word) merits scrutiny (not to mention a belly laugh).  After spotlighting Abrams’s “worst state” comment, the ad features a montage of positive business headlines that are then used as a springboard to the “best place to live” claim.

A strong local economy is obviously critical to a community’s overall viability, but economic development doesn’t automatically lead to quality-of-life improvements and the two don’t always go hand in hand. Further, it seems worth noting that the much-vaunted business ranking from Area Development magazine focuses exclusively on business considerations and does not, as nearly as TIGC has been able to discern, factor in quality-of-life metrics.

Indeed, at least one of the key categories Area Development uses to measure and compare the 50 states seems to be at odds with improving the economic livelihood of individual Georgia citizens. More than 30 years ago, the General Assembly created a job tax credit program that measured the economic standing of Georgia’s counties by three key metrics — unemployment, poverty, and per capita income. Counties that scored poorly by those measures would be targeted with generous tax credits to encourage businesses to set up shop and create jobs in them.

Through the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s, Georgia made remarkable progress on arguably the most important of those three — per capita income (as TIGC has documented in previous posts, here, here, and here). Between 1980 and the end of the century, the state’s average PCI rose from 84.5 percent of the national average to 95 percent, and our rank among the 50 states climbed from 38th to 24th.

In the first decade of the current century, Georgia’s PCI performance fell back to 1980 levels; as of 2010, our average PCI was 85.6 percent of the national average and we ranked 40th among the 50 states. That reversal of fortune coincided with the transition of political power at the State Capitol from Democrat to Republican. While it’s difficult to determine cause and effect, the state’s first GOP governor in modern times, Sonny Perdue, presided during his eight years in office over a 15-place drop in the national rankings. Only one state suffered a bigger drop during that same period; Delaware fell 16 places.

Since then, the state’s PCI performance has been relatively static, bobbing up and down slightly first under Governor Nathan Deal and now under Kemp. As of the end of 2020, Kemp’s second year in office, the state’s average PCI was up to 87 percent of the national average but our rank remained 40th among the 50 states.

In Area Development’s view, that’s apparently not a bad thing. Georgia, for instance, tied with Texas for the No. 1 spot in a category called “Competitive Labor Market,” about which the magazine said, in part: “Companies choosing locations in Georgia and Texas appreciate the fact that they both have wages below the average in more than half of all other states … “

That wasn’t true when the Republicans came to power, but it certainly is now — with the ironic consequence that Georgia’s claim to being the No. 1 state for business is predicated in part on the fact that its citizens earn less on average than their counterparts in 39 other states.

Area Development, however, isn’t the only media outlet that ranks states for their overall business environment. CNBC has been doing the same thing since 2007, and Georgia generally fares well in its rankings as well; the state finished in CNBC’s Top 10 every year except 2008 and claimed 1st place in 2014.

CNBC’s methodology has evolved over time, however, and recently it added a category it calls “Life, Health & Inclusion.” Here, the news for Georgia is not so good.

CNBC even published an online sidebar under the headline “These 10 states are America’s worst places to live in 2021.” In this “Life, Health & Inclusion” category, Georgia got an “F” and finished 6th — that is, as the 6th worst place to live in America. Behind Alabama.

Let me repeat that: Behind Alabama.

The challenge for Abrams is in communicating this kind of information in ways that rile voters up without turning them off. If Kemp is trying to make voters feel good about Georgia as a place to live, Abrams should be trying to make them mad. So far, I’m not sure she’s accomplishing that. Most of her critiques (that I’ve seen) have focused on the state as a whole.

She’s up on social media, for example, with an ad that spotlights 82 Georgia counties that don’t have any OB/GYNs and another (below right) that lists the state’s poor ranking in a number of health-related categories. Whether that kind of messaging cuts through remains to be seen. I don’t have the benefit of any polling data, but I’m skeptical that statewide numbers resonate at local levels.

Take, for example, Brantley County. Located in deep southeast Georgia, Brantley County ranks near the bottom of every national economic, educational, and health analysis I’ve conducted. Nationally, it ranks in the bottom one percent of U.S. counties for per capita income, the bottom five percent for educational attainment, and the bottom 13 percent for premature death — and it’s actually doing better than a fair number of its neighboring rural Georgia counties.

But the thing that distinguishes Brantley County is that it’s the most Republican county in the entire state. In the 2016 presidential election, Brantley County voters gave Donald Trump 88 percent of their vote. In the governor’s race two years later, they went for Kemp by an even bigger margin — 91.3 percent to 8.1 percent for Abrams. In the 2020 presidential race, they sided 10-to-1 with Trump: 90.3 percent for the incumbent Republican to 9.0 percent for Joe Biden.

If voters anywhere ought to be frustrated with their economic, education, and health situations, you’d think it would be the folks in Brantley County — especially since they’ve been losing ground in recent years. In 2002, the last year a Democrat occupied the governor’s office, its average PCI was 63.3 percent of the national average; in 2020, the latest year for which data is available, Brantley’s average PCI was down to 50.4 percent of the national average.

Kemp, of course, is at no risk of losing Brantley County, but if Abrams succeeds at getting even a small fraction of voters there and in other beleaguered blood-red counties to think about something other than the party label, it just might make a difference.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Dec 9

3 Comments

Georgia’s 40-year PCI rollercoaster ride

In the final 20 years of the last century, Georgia made remarkable economic progress on at least one front: the state’s per capita income (PCI) gained more than 10 percentage points against the national average and came within five points of that important benchmark. In the process, the state’s PCI rank among the 50 states and the District of Columbia climbed from a low of 41st to a high of 25th.

In the first two decades of this century, however, Georgia has surrendered nearly all those gains and fallen back into the nation’s bottom ranks for per capita income. Its 2020 rank was 37th. Only three states gained more ground against the national PCI average than Georgia between 1980 and 2000, and only four lost more ground between 2000 and 2020.

In the process, hundreds of thousands of Georgians were first lifted out of the bottom national quartile for per capita income but have since fallen back into it. As TIGC reported in its last post, Georgia finished 2020 with more of its citizens living in bottom-quartile PCI counties than any other state in the union, including states like Texas and Florida with significantly larger populations.

While that last post focused exclusively on new 2020 data released in November by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), this one takes a deeper look at a half-century’s worth of PCI data with an eye toward trying to answer a question we posed in the last post: Why is such a large portion of Georgians apparently stuck at the bottom of the nation’s income ladder?

The answer to that question remains elusive, but the lookback at the last 50 years reveals that Georgia has been on a PCI rollercoaster that is all but unique among the 50 states and D.C. Through the 1970s, Georgia’s PCI ranking was basically flat at between 38th and 40th place among the 50 states and D.C. But from 1983 through the end of the century, the state’s ranking climbed steadily, if unevenly, to a peak of 25th place in 1999 before plateauing at 26th place for the next three years. Since then, Georgia has dropped precipitously in the national PCI rankings. It bottomed out at 40th and 41st from 2008 through 2015 before rebounding to 37th by the end of 2020.

These are among the major findings and observations from an ongoing TIGC review of 50 years of personal income data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

And while identifying the exact causes of the state’s rollercoaster ride will require further research, it’s difficult to ignore the overlap between the rise and fall of the state’s PCI fortunes with the transition in the state’s political leadership: all the gains occurred under Democratic governors and all the losses followed under Republicans.

The most dramatic progress came under Governor Joe Frank Harris, who served from 1983 through 1990. During that period, Georgia moved up in the PCI rankings from 37th to 30th. The progress continued under Governor Zell Miller, who succeeded Harris and served the next eight years. After plateauing at 30th or 31st for three years, the state resumed its climb and reached 26th place by the time Miller left office at the end of 1998. Under Governor Roy Barnes, the state’s last Democratic governor, the state’s PCI ranking peaked at 25th in 1999 and then plateaued at 26th for the final three years of his one term in office.

Barnes lost his 2002 reelection bid to Sonny Perdue, who took office in January 2003 as the state’s first Republican governor in modern times and went on to handily win reelection in 2006. By the time he left office in 2010, Georgia’s national PCI ranking had plunged 15 spots to 41st, tying an all-time low for the last half-century.

Under Nathan Deal, Perdue’s successor and the state’s second GOP governor in more than a century, the state’s national PCI ranking floated along at 41st and 40th for the first five years of Deal’s two terms before rebounding slightly to 38th by the time he left office. Now two years into the term of the state’s third Republican leader in modern times, Governor Brian Kemp, the state stands 37th in the nation’s PCI ranking — the same ranking it had when Governor Harris took office.

Whether the various governors deserved all the credit or blame for the ups and downs in the PCI rankings is a matter for debate, but it seems a fair question. Were there changes in economic development, education or other policies and practices that drove the rankings and, more importantly, the personal fortunes of Georgians impacted by the 40-year seesaw effect? Or was it all just a huge coincidence?

As part of this analysis, I have used the BEA data to rank all the counties in the country by per capita income, sort them into national quartiles, and then pull the 159 Georgia counties out of the national list. As a result, I can determine how many Georgia counties — and Georgians — lived in each quartile in any given year. So far, I’ve done this part of the analysis for each year preceding a gubernatorial transition.

At the end of 1982, just before Harris took office, some 21.8 percent of the state’s 5.65 million residents — about 1.23 million people — lived in 91 counties in the bottom quartile of the nation’s PCI rankings. By the time Barnes left office in 20 years later, those numbers were down dramatically: less than 10 percent of the state’s 8.51 million citizens — fewer than 830,000 people — lived in 53 counties in that bottom national quartile.

When Perdue left office in 2010, the percentage of Georgians living in bottom quartile counties had exploded to more than 30.3 percent of the state’s estimated population of 9.7 million people — some 2.9 million people in 104 counties. At the end of 2020, the picture was no better: more than 3.05 million Georgians were living in 104 bottom quartile counties — the most of any state in the country, as TIGC reported in its last post.

To be clear, Georgia’s PCI has continued to rise throughout this period, but for the past 18 years it has lost ground against the national average. When Barnes left office at the end of 2002, the state’s average PCI of $30,133 was 94.6 percent of the national average of $31,859. When Perdue left office eight years later, the state’s average PCI stood at $34,830, but that was only 85.6 percent of the national average for 2002: $40,690.

The two graphs below should help tell this story. The first one illustrates the rise and fall of Georgia’s per capita income as a percentage of the national average. The straight blue line across the upper part of the graph represents the national average across the 40-year timescale. The orange line below it illustrates the rise and fall of Georgia’s per capita income as a percentage of that national average.

This second graph shows how Georgia’s actual per capita income tracks against the national average over the past 40 years. The gap narrowed, sometimes unevenly, through the 1980s and ’90s before beginning to widen at the turn of the century.

This is the second of at least three posts I’m developing based on the BEA’s latest economic data. In the next one, I’ll return to my usual focus on the state’s urban-rural divide, including trends in the different regions of the state.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2021